With a jam-packed Australian comedy festival season right on the horizon, local comedian Chris Ryan will be dialling in her set with three nights of new material shows before hitting the road.
In just a few weeks, Ryan will do two weeks’ worth of gigs at the Adelaide Fringe before the Canberra Comedy Festival at the end of March, followed by stints in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and the Gold Coast.
Assuming all goes ahead as planned, it will be the first full Australian comedy festival season since 2019.
“I’ve had a great time at home, but I am so ready to take to the road,” she told Canberra Daily. “You want to be in amongst it if you’re creating … it’s a great life!”
To prepare, Ryan is performing a Future Classics comedy show at The Q Foyer and Bar on 10-12 February, trialling 30-45 minutes each of new material with Sydney-based comedian, Luke Heggie.
“It’s about being quite uncomfortable as performers, but as an audience member I think it’s more interesting because you see behind the curtain,” she said.
After their sets, they will get on stage together, swap phones, and read out each other’s notes; going through recent ideas that haven’t been fleshed out into jokes yet.
“We’ll have that risk of absolutely not knowing what we’re going to say about a topic,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll generate even more material from forcing ourselves to do that.
“The more you do it, the more you realise you have to be that way, there’s no other way to get to good material.”
Her 2022 festival show, Can’t Complain, was born out of Ryan’s sense that despite the hardships we’ve endured over the past two years, most Australians “have got it pretty good”.
A lot of her material is based around the curious behaviour we’ve all engaged in to cope with and process the last few years.
“We feel so deeply disconnected, the more I spend on my phone the less connected I feel, yet I love my friends, but they know I don’t want to talk to them or see them,” she smiled.
“It’s like we’ve all been on a desert island speaking to a soccer ball for two years, everyone’s just a little bit insane, a little bit edgy, a little bit intense.”
With a dearth of gigs last year, Ryan and Heggie kept each other writing and motivated with weekly Zoom catch-ups to run new material by each other.
“We’ve been supporting each other and trying to get a good bunch of jokes together for this year, because you can’t just be like ‘oh, sorry guys, I know this show is bad, but it was hard’,” she said.
Having that weekly deadline gave them an impetus to write at a time when it understandably would have been hard to find the motivation.
“The worst part of lockdown and having these gigs cancelled has been not just being unable to gig and get paid, but also not having a deadline to write material for and get excited about,” she said.
“I’m actually really surprised I have enough material with the handful of gigs there’s been!”
Future Classics with Chris Ryan and Luke Heggie will be performed at The Q Foyer and Bar, Queanbeyan, 10-12 February 7.30pm; click here for tickets.
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